User blog:Shiramu-Kuromu/A controversial opinion... plus a question.
So basically I was talking to MongooseLover a few hours ago about what it would be like for a story nowadays to portray predatory and herbivorous animals as the way they truly should be dietary wise, and not use stereotyping of "carnivore is bad, herbivore is good", and I came to a conclusion based off of some of our exchanges. Sugarcoating a carnivorous animal in fiction to not outright kill their primary prey for food does not make the situation better regarding the audience; it only creates deception as to what the animal rightfully is. What will the young audiences think to see The Lion King nowadays? That if Simba eats primarily bugs, he would be a happy Lion for life and that would increase the overall perception of the animal? No. That would simply encourage a policy I am against. I do not hate people who put themselves on strictly vegetarian diets... but it's just not the way us as humans work. We are omnivores, we eat anything we can. That's what we are. African lions are warm-blooded animals that need plenty of food to sustain themselves for a day; even Asia's Tigers hunt almost constantly to feed themselves and hardly ever rest in the midst of a day. An Orca would not be content with simply fish; they feed off of just about anything to fulfill their dietary needs, and to sustain their unconquerable rule of the modern day seas. A strictly Carnivorous animal will never always resort to an opportunistic attitude for a kill, or settle for a sheer bulk of a single type of prey for food. A fully fledged, healthy carnivore will eat various types of animals within their natural diet to ensure a strong, healthy lifestyle. Giving the message through fiction that predators have alternatives is never always the good thing; it simply results in stereotyping of carnivores if portrayed in a negative light for simply their diets alone. Tell me, which would you rather have? A protagonist who kills simply to eat and survive and is not sinned for having to do so? Or a villain who is supposed to kill to eat and survive, but is instead portrayed as a sociopathic, sadistic monstrosity with zero redeeming qualities? I'm not joking by using Indominus rex as the reference for that second link. Ever since I had watched You Are Umasou, and even will be watching its sequel, I always had a feeling fiction would finally catch up and begin to show their audience that even if a carnivore doesn't act like famous examples such as Simba or Chomper, doesn't mean they have to be outright bastardized for their dietary needs in life. You Are Umasou was rather simple with how it did so; it didn't even try to sugarcoat the topic to where the messages showed that even true carnivores had an actual heart and mind. Indominus rex, on the other hand, absolutely disgusts me with it's behavior; it almost never actually eats the animals it kills, and slaughters an entire herd of Apatosaurus for fun without eating any of their corpses left behind. Everywhere it went, almost nothing was alive by the time it had left. Even with it's isolated into madness backstory, that is by no means EVER an excuse for the exaggerated behavior Indominus shows herself to have. The worst part? Indominus actually has a high level of intelligence unlike your generic antagonist carnivore in the films where animals don't talk at all. Indominus is the absolute most heinous depiction of a carnivorous animal in media; because the monstrosity has no sense of necessity to kill to survive, just to kill for sport. Is that REALLY a message you want the young audiences to have? Is that the predatory animals in the world simply kill for sport?! I would rather live in a world akin to You Are Umasou rather than the tarnished kingdom of Isla Nublar any day, solely because the carnivores in the former have actual reasoning for what they do and why; Indominus has no actual reason, whether you think it does or not. Regardless on what your opinion on this whole subject is, regardless of what views you have in the world; everyone deserves to see a story, fictional or not, in which the carnivorous animals of the world presented are not automatically declared evil for how they live to merely survive. So, with that said, I ask of you; what do you personally believe of this type of subject? Category:Blog posts